Numerous organizations process incoming, outgoing, and internal messages to extract valuable information about the ongoing activities, for instance, to monitor the degree of satisfaction of the employees, the extent of business collaboration with the outside world, or to follow a specific transaction. In providers such as Yahoo! or Gmail, an extremely large number of messages are processed in appropriate filters everyday to eliminate spam and malware or to group them in several categories for ease of use. Alternatively, message monitoring helps identify network intruders by analyzing the incoming, outgoing, and internal messages of a given company.
The message-processing unit needs to act on a message and then move on to the next message. In most situations, such as in grouping email messages, this method proves adequate. There are instances, however, that the meaning of a message, and hence the group it should be assigned to, depends on the previous or next messages. In other words, the meaning of the message in those instances can only be apparent in its appropriate context. There are applications, which include complex event processing, but they let the original message pass unaffected. Presently, a method to gather related messages in a group, before they are processed as a collection, does not exist. The present invention is about categorizing messages in several collections to be processed in the context to which they belong.